Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Wife in the North

So many times we mothers are faced with the decision of being honest about our daily struggles or pretending that we have it all together so that our friends will think better of us. haha, all my friends know I am the freak mom that has chickens in her backyard and lets her kids get really (REALLY) dirty, life is too short! In Wife in the North, her fears, her doubts and her temper tantrums are all laid bare as a release. Judith began documenting her struggles in the form of a daily diary on her blog, Wife in the North and soon it took off, took off into a book contract for the book named by her blog title, Wife in the North.

Judith is a mother, a wife and a city girl who will have to adapt to living in the country for a set period of time. At least she has that, that after the alloted time period the family will make the choice to stay in the northern far-and-away town with no good shopping, or they will embrace the chaos and business of city life by moving back to London. Judith in this memoir is not into sugar coating anything, she hates it. She lives daily in loathing of where she is at and wishing that her husband would come home from his business trips and stay with them for a while. Judith speaks of loneliness, loss and the desire to fit in and at the same time not fit in because that would alter her London city girl image.

I enjoyed this read, I did find it a tad bit negative, but really if I had my inner thoughts written on paper they would be slightly to extremely negative depending on what was being asked of me. More than anything I eat up honesty and Wife in the North is filled with it. I could feel her grief, her loss, her loneliness and feelings of not belonging, not fitting, and that her kids were driving her crazy. It was extremely personable. If you enjoy memoirs, read this one and tell me what you think!

I will soon have an author interview and a giveaway for your own copy of Wife In the North, so stay tuned :) In the mean time, answer me this: What kind of mom or dad are you? Do you let your kids practice the 10 second rule (in our house it is more like the minute rule!)? Do you scrub everything bare with disinfectant and essential oils? What does your day look like as a parent?

As of yet I have no bebbies, but I can tell you what kind of WIFE I am, and I'll probably be the same as a mother. I am 100% the natural-consequences wife. Baby, I don't have any clean socks! Well that's odd, because I just did laundry yesterday OH YEAH! You have a whole pile of DIRTY socks just north of the hamper, ergo they did not get in the wash, ergo they are not washed, ergo either do your own laundry now or throw those bad boys in the hamper and wear flip flops in the rain until I decide to do laundry again.

Wow this sounds like a great memoir. When you mentioned that it seems a bit negative, my first thought was that it may sound bad but it would be honest and that's what I like in memoirs. When people ask how my day went I reply with "oh good, you know" when I could probably list off 25 minor disasters in a snap.

What kind of mom am I? Well, I used to be super-anal about housework - then my kids got older and I realized that if I spent all my time cleaning them and their messes they would grow up before I noticed. Now I relax more and spend one day a week hosing everything down :)

Sounds like an interesting book, though I don't read too many memoirs.

My house is never spotless. It never will be with an absent-minded husband and a rambunctious 8 year old! I'm not so worried about clutter because our place is so small and she's a kid who likes her toys and books and art stuff. But I'm strict about cleaning up food, dirt, that kind of stuff. I don't care too much if she makes a mess (depending on what it is) as long as it's cleaned up afterward.